The Web enables you to publish your business content or express your opinions and ideas through your blogs to a very wide audience easily. However, it does not end in that way, you also need to understand your audience by connecting with them to make them feel comfortable. More likely your site will get recommendations from your audience to other people if it “thinks” the way they do. One way to know how your visitors use your site is to know how they react on it is through web analytics. Web analytics will help you improve your site to be user- friendly as well as search engine friendly too.
According to Wikipedia Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage. Web analytics may either be on- site or off- site web analytics. On- site web analytics refers to measuring your visitor’s activities while they are on your website such activities includes which landing pages that encourage them to make you a sale. On- site web analytics measures your website’s performance in a commercial context, and the data gathered are often used against key performance indicators to improve your website’s marketing campaign or rankings in search engines as well as the response of your audience. Off- site web analytics refers to the measurement and analysis of website irrespective whether you own or maintain it. It includes the measurement of your opportunity, visibility and comments in the Web as a whole.
If your website is an extension of your business and competition is tough, more likely your competitors may be using web analytics or other internet marketing tools or strategies to gain more customers and achieve their online business objectives. In particular, using web analytics does not only let you gain more customers, but more valuable ones. Other than design and behaviour web analytics may also used to diagnose server problems, nd measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns.
In short, web analytics can help you improve your website performance, improve your marketing costs and help you improve customer relationship. Knowing the behaviour of your visitors allows you find your weak spots where they may be dropping out and make changes to your site that ultimately lead to more business. Investing much on marketing campaigns does not assure you of yielding better results. The sheer quantifiability of analytics data means it’s easy to establish what is and what’s not working. What does not work can be changed while ones that work well can be maximise. Web analytics is an essential and helpful tool in online marketing and it will guide you to investing on the right tools and strategies in achieving your online success. At UK SEO Agency, we study, gather and analyse the data of our client’s website and create an effective strategy out of the given data. Thus, UK SEO Agency ensures you to deliver meaningful and successful results that will yield into the achievement of your online business objectives.
Welcome to my next analytic’s installment: “Setting up Goals” in this blog we are going to discuss setting up goals in goggle analytic’s. Goal allows you to filter data, tailor to a specific instance; for example one of the most common goals for a e-Commerce Website is the completion of an online sales.
Some goal examples are:
- When a user completes a check out form.
- When user sign-up to your Newsletter, (Mail lists Goal)
- When user creates a lead via a contact forms (Lead generator Goal)
- When user downloads a catalogue.pdf (Information downloads Goal)
- When a user goes to a specific webpage (page view Goal)
There are lot more type of goal that the above examples but in a nutshell goals are anything that you want to track; which has a purpose in your marketing/business model. For this blog I am going to setup a very basic goal for monitoring of newsletter sign-up .To start with log-in to your analytics account and create a new profile for your site; Then Go to action>edit for that particular profile. This will take you to you Profile Settings pages in the second section name “Conversion Goals and Funnel” you will see a row start with G1, in the far right of the row under setting you will see a link call “edit” click this link to go to the goal setup page. On the goal setup page their are two section, for this blog we are only concerned about the first section “Enter Goal Information”. Start by activating the goal, follow by entering the Match type for simplicity let keep it on Exact Match. Next enter the goal url; the goal url is the address of the page user are sent to on completion of the said goal normally some thing along the lines of “www.mysite.co.uk/thankyou.html”. Next give the goal a Name I.e. “newsletter sign up” and that it, goal value is a little advance at this stage and can be left a it’s default 0.0 and inmost cases “case sensitive” should be left un-check. Once you check all this hit save and you have setup you first goal.
Many companies today have analytics on their websites but only a handful actually use it; other than to see how many hit they got the other day. Many business people look at analytic’s As another type of SEO voodoo but trust me analytics is core to any Internet business and the basics are pretty easy when you know. However like ever thing in SEO you can take Google analytics to many levels but for now let not get a head of are self’s.
There are a number of basic things to setup once you have installed Google analytics, all of which will aid you in your quest to understand how your site is working in term of traffic. The first thing to do is make sure you remove you office IP address from the data being collected, many business don’t even think about doing this, but if you don’t you may corrupt your traffic data in a big way! Plus it doesn’t take an SEO shaman to set it up.
Just log in to your analytics, at the bottom right you will see a link called filters, click it and it will take you to the Filter Manager page. Filter management does what it say on the tin, it filters out unwanted traffic from your analytics data, in this case we want to take out the office IP. For this you want to create a new filter by click the “Add Filter link” located in the darkest grey box at the right hand side and it will take you to the Create New Filter page. The are two sections the first section is call enter filter information. This is contain three field Filters: Name, Filter Type and Domain. In the first field “Filter Name” Name your filter: for instance: “Exclude office IP” always try to name and filter after what they are doing; it goes with out say really but I will say it anyway.
Next is “Filter Type:” this is a drop down box, for this you want to select the option “Exclude all traffic from an ip address.” Finally the last option “IP address” for this you will need to know your offices IP not you the computer you on but the IP address of the router for the whole building to do this go to start run and enter the following “ipconfig” and press the Enter The Gateway button, this should be the IP of your offices router enter this information in to the IP address in Google analytics and just apply it to your site profile in section two and your done.
I hope you have found this blog useful, look out for Google Analytics part two, coming soon!
